A computer science professor
once said that if you?re going to enter into a business,
regardless of the nature, your goal should be to find something
that no one else has done, and do it. Although it is a highly
idealistic approach when applied to many situations, that is the
philosophy of one mainboard manufacturer that is truly a rags to
riches story to tell the tweaking children of the future.

...and thus went the introduction
of AnandTech's ABIT BX6 Revision
2.0 Review. Since then, ABIT has been dethroned as the only solution for
overclockers, the times have changed, overclocking the 300A is no longer a topic
on all bulletin boards, and most importantly, the changes have forced ABIT to
move a bit quicker with their production. The delay of Intel's Camino chipset
(i820) has given more than one company the opportunity to step in and succeed
in what would otherwise be imminent failure. It's example time...

VIA Technologies, chief competitor
to Intel in terms of chipsets, would have been beat to the punch
if Intel began shipping their 133MHz FSB compliant 820 parts to
motherboard manufacturers when they originally intended to.

AMD, chief competitor to Intel in
terms of desktop processors, would have a difficult time
convincing users of the strengths of their Athlon processor if
Intel had stuck to the original deployment schedule of the
Coppermine processor, intended to go hand in hand with the
release of the Camino chipset.

And more relevant to the topic at
hand, the delay of the Camino chipset has opened up the fields
yet again for a mainboard manufacturer to step in and take the
crown for best BX board. For a while that champion was ABIT with
their extremely successful BH6/BX6 solutions, however with an
apparent lack of attention from ABIT, companies like AOpen, ASUS,
IWill, and Soyo stepped in to take what they felt belonged to
them. With updated BX boards from those four companies and many
more, and with a large portion of them featuring very ABIT-esque
tweaking utilities (i.e. wide range of overclocked FSB settings,
core voltage tweaking, etc...) it was time for the unofficial
king of overclocking to make a return to the throne.

This time around ABIT isn't
banking on overclocking to take them to the top, as the limits of
the current technology have pretty much been reached. FSB speeds
past 133MHz are nice to boast about, however they aren't feasible
settings for most gamers with AGP video cards (the AGP clock runs
too far out of spec) nor most users that don't have the highest
of quality SDRAM. So what is ABIT betting the farm on? The
success of a new line of BX boards, the most exotic of them being
the BP6, the world's first Dual Socket-370 motherboard with on-board
Ultra ATA 66 support. Sound sketchy? Let's take a look at what
happens when the overclocking king meets the reality of the dual
processing world...

If it ain't broke,
don't fix it, right? Well, ABIT built the BP6 on a PCB that obviously wasn't
"broke," more specifically, the PCB used on the BX6
Revision 2.0. The 5/2/1 expansion slot configuration (PCI/ISA/AGP) was
ported over from the BX6R2 and now features only two full length PCI slots
due to a new obstruction on the BP6. The 3 DIMM slots made it over from
the BH6, space and cost
concerns most likely kept the fourth DIMM slot from making it to the production
BP6. Keep in mind that although the BP6 isn't technically an Extended ATX
form factor motherboard, the BX6R2-sized PCB it is built on may prove to
be a little tight in some smaller ATX cases. If you know your case will
comfortably house a BX6R2, then you also know that it will comfortable provide
a home for a BP6.

The most eye
catching feature of the BP6 is, of course, the Dual PPGA-370
sockets on the motherboard. The BP6 features the
appropriate SMP IO controller for dual processor
operation, however the first warning you see upon opening
the BP6 User's Manual is the following paragraph:

"Based on peripheral
specifications and other considerations, the BP6 SMP (Symmetric
Multiple Processor) function is designed for testing only.
The BP^ motherboard can't manage the SMP function alone.
It must co-operate with the CPU and OS that support the
SMP function. Therefore, if you employ an improper CPU or
OS causing the SMP function to fail, resulting in any
damage to your hardware or software damage, we will not
take any responsibility"

What that basically
says is that ABIT does not guarantee the BP6 will work in dual
processor mode with two PPGA Celeron processors and the two
sockets are there solely for the purpose of internal testing. Of
course the manual does say the same thing about the overclocked
FSB settings...